Learning how to learn

Duchess learns best in a social environment. (The internet tells me that she has an "interpersonal" learning style.) Put her into a group of any size, and she is galvanized, becoming engaged, focused, and motivated. Take away the human interaction, and she loses interest. She'll still plug through whatever she's required to do, but there's no joy in it and no spark. She comes up with ideas for projects and activities all the time, but she doesn't follow through with them unless she's able to engage somebody else.

As Cook and I have increasingly recognized this, we've been thinking about ways she can leverage this tendency in herself. (Study groups! Team sports!) One thing that has surprised me, possibly because I'm extremely old, is that she can feed off the social interaction even when it's not in person. She has been working on a few projects in Scratch, a simple drag-and-drop programming language, on the MIT site, which encourages users to share their projects. Cook and I have encouraged this, because we want her to be able to get a job. The first time she worked on a Scratch project for a few hours, I was baffled by her persistence.  Then she begged to check the Scratch site that evening to see "how many pageviews" her project had gotten, and I realized that the social element of working on a project in the cloud is enough to keep her rolling. Yesterday (home with a bad cold) she was delighted to find that other people had starred her projects, and one person had "remixed" one of her projects. She spent several hours working on a new project, and we had to pry her away to eat dinner and then to go to bed. I never, ever thought that I would have to pry Duchess away from coding. From coding!*

This is a mystery to me. I'm pretty much a social learner myself, but while I love having my blog posts viewed and commented by people I know, and I enjoy interacting with strangers in real life, I have no interest in interacting with strangers on the web. The privacy settings on my various social media accounts are set fairly restrictively. I don't use Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Instagram.* Duchess doesn't feel this way. She's a modern person, and she's going to grow up interacting with strangers on the web. She's going to be posting tutorials on YouTube any minute now. This is probably a good thing for a person who learns socially, but I'm doing a little mental scramble to try to catch up.

At Duchess's kung fu program, she has a little clique with two other girls her age. They act like a parody of nine-year-old girls in a clique - they shriek excitedly when they see each other, and hold hands and jump up and down. She lights up when she's with them. A few months ago, she and her favorite clique member did a "holds" form together for a tournament, and they got together for a practice session at the studio on the weekend, in some unused practice space. They had no coaching, but they didn't mess around, they worked hard on what they were supposed to do, and they had so much fun together. It was a pleasure to see. I hope that Duchess is able to deploy that joyful collaborative approach throughout her life. Even if it is sometimes online.


* Admittedly, I have no delusions of privacy on the web, and I'm fairly promiscuous about handing my credit card number over to strangers over the web.
**Though, to be clear, she's not exactly engaged in knotty programming problems. She mostly creates narrative stories, and spends a lot of time trying to decide what costume the character should wear.

Miscellany

Skipper is into space this week.* She has been asking lots of questions and poring over an old Click magazine issue about space. She dug up an astronaut bear stuffed animal given to her by a NASA fan a few years ago, renamed it "Davy Baby Space Bear," and given it Most Favored Animal status.** However, when Cook delivered a bedtime story (an installment in the six-year-long Pippa and the Penguin series), in which the child heroine and her avian companion were SEPARATED from the parents and accidentally caught a ride on a spaceship, Skipper freaked out and had to hide under her pillow until the family was reunited. Apparently, we will all have to come along when Skipper makes her first space mission.

Today we took the girls to an open house at a local dance/theater/music education nonprofit, where they were offering free half-hour classes. Skipper was excited in advance, but when we got there, she didn't want to participate. ("I don't like this class because you have to talk," she told me.) Duchess, however, got to participate in an improvisational theater class, which (of course) she adored. Cook and I watched the whole thing, and we were both really struck by how much any 8-year-old (or human being of any age) can benefit from some improv training. The primary rule, more or less, are that you say "yes" to any idea that is tossed your way, that you listen and respond and not "block" your teammates' ideas by changing the storyline too drastically or by refusing to go along with their ideas. Funny but irrelevant non sequiturs are discouraged. There are no mistakes. It's all about paying attention, being generous to yourself and your partners, enthusiastically diving into ideas but still keeping an eye on the big picture to make sure things aren't veering too far off course... doesn't this sound like a recipe for success in conversations, relationships, projects - just about everything? I've decided that every second-grader in Portland should have a weekly improv class.

While I'm fixing up public education, I've decided that math needs an overhaul, too. This week my curiosity overpowered my budgeting willpower, and I purchased a ridiculously expensive ($6!) math game app for my awesome tablet. Duchess has been playing it as much as she is allowed, and it appears to be more or less teaching her algebra.*** It's pretty cool, and I think the school district should have all the kids learn algebra by playing a video game for a few hours. I'll include that in my overhaul.

And, for your last item of miscellany, I took Skipper to the dentist last week, and she LET THEM DO AN X-RAY. She cried quite a bit throughout the whole experience, but the incentive of getting screen time ("Wonderpets" again) was enough to make her power through. She may be actually growing up. For a bonus, the staff lavishly praised her excellent oral hygiene, she got a sticker, and she has no cavities. Huzzah!


* Hey, NASA. I assume you're aware that Sunita Williams is a fabulous ambassador for the space program, but having her/allowing her to host a 25-minute video tour of the space station was a really great idea, particularly if you were wanting to add "astronaut" to the career wishlists of girls around the country.
** Eat your heart out, Punghy.
***Though it's not perfect, and occasionally the presence of a coach with some grasp of math is very helpful.

If I got a chance to be a totally different person than myself, this is what I'd like to do.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/

I wish I had an orchestra of my very own.

Recommendations

Not much going on. I'm feeling a little insane about my job, and Cook is a little insane about painting the house and generally improving everything. However, the kids seem to be barreling along with their lives, loud and happy and, you know, growing up.
But what I really wanted to tell you is that I have a new TV thing! I just want to say that if I ever go on a reality TV show to show off my awesome dance skills, I would like to hope that I would get up there and deliver a pretty cool dance about the mating habits of insects.

Music in schools

I'd write about it, but I'll just let Sheila Esquivel tell you about it.

Interlude for cookbooks.

I like recipes. I am not a creative person in general, and I am really not creative with cooking. I know a few people who are good cooks, and some who can Iron-Chef a pile of random ingredients and come up with something fabulous off the top of their head, but I can turn a pile of random ingredients only into a more compact, cooked pile of random ingredients.* I do, however, like to eat good food. So I depend heavily on cookbooks.

For years, Cook and I boringly depended on cookbooks mostly from the Moosewood juggernaut and Jeanne Lemlin. However, using only cookbooks by a handful of people means that you're stuck cooking meals from a limited arsenal. Jeanne Lemlin, for example, is terrific, but she loves zucchini and red bell peppers to an extent that I cannot match. Also, we try to cook meals that are at least loosely based on what's in season, and those sources are not great for that - zucchini and bell peppers are in EVERYTHING. So we've been diversifying over the last five years or so, and just in the last year I've run into a few recipe sources that have made me really happy - Smitten Kitchen (for baking especially), Melissa Clark, and now Heidi Swanson.**

But I want more. Got any recommendations for me?

*The only exception is simple meals made with really good ingredients, which are almost impossible to really screw up. I can make something good out of pasta, good tomatoes, olive oil, and fresh mozzarella, but so could a baby baboon.
** Cook went to work yesterday with a big container full of coconut, kale, and farro for his lunch, and he was all excited about it. That man is going to live to be 120.

Problem solved.

Cook's decided that all we need to do to make sure our kids get a decent education is to have them do something quirky and adorable, get noticed by a gregarious independent film-maker, and become a viral internet sensation.*

So now I feel better.

*Not to say that that kid doesn't totally deserve an awesome college fund, because he is exceptionally charming. And the movie makes me feel good about people, which I really appreciate, since I'm very much on the misanthropic side of things lately.

Memes IRL

Skipper's been riding her balance bike a lot lately. Today she rode it while I walked to pick up Dutch at school. She typically zooms ahead of me, then gets distracted or waits for me, and I keep a steady pace, so we sort of leapfrog our way along. She had some technical trouble at one point, and fell down with her bike as I passed her. She looked at me to verify that she was okay, and then got up and picked her bike up in a business-like way and got back on, while I kept walking ahead of her. We were heading up a long, uphill block that ends at a busy intersection with two crossing bus lines, and there was a small cluster of scruffy young homeless-looking people at the bus stop. I realized that they were watching Skipper,* and they were all smiling, and one of them said "That kid is biking like a boss!" I had not realized that this is something people outside the internets actually say, so I watched them warily as we approached, just in case they suddenly turned into LOLcats. They didn't. They were beaming and they greeted Skipper warmly as we passed. She beamed back.

Skipper looks younger than her almost-three years, because she's short and chubby,** so she looks extra-comical with her bike, and the pride emanates off of her in almost-visible waves. It makes me laugh every time I see her ride, so I understand why the total strangers were delighted to see her. She totally does bike like a boss.

*It's probably worth noting that Skipper was wearing one of her favorite outfits, fuchsia leggings with red patent leather ankle boots and a short furry coat (the hood has ears on it) with a satiny, quilted pink lining, which all adds up with her rashy dry face to make her look (to me) like a tiny, plump Hollywood starlet who has recently fired her stylist and gotten a chemical peel. All she's missing is a pair of enormous sunglasses.

** For the same reason, I also look younger than my age, except for the shocking wrinkling and tragic hollows around my eyes.

I hope they're at least not laundering their fleece jackets...

While these tweets make me squeamish, I can see as how this could be Dutch in ten years.

Two Things I've Learned Lately (What is a Weekend?)

1) Gluten-free baked goods do not age well.
2) There should be a role for Maggie Smith in every TV show. I really mean it.

In case you were wondering what adulthood is all about.

Yesterday Skipper told me about what she will do when she becomes a grown-up. Here is the complete list:
1) Go to work and go to school and go to Gresham.
2) Sleep alone in a really big bed.
3) Wash dishes.
4) Do stuff on the computer.

Science, again, with grumpy feelings

I've been to the local science museum this week twice, with just Skipper and then today with both kids and Cook. Skipper mostly hung out in the little-kids area. She liked watching the other kids. Both Cook and I were struck by the phenomenon of kids playing while their parents stood beside them, texting (and occasionally taking photos of their kids, presumably to be immediately posted to facebook). This is ubiquitous behavior, but we haven't been spending much time lately around small-kid-attracting places, so we've been re-sensitized. And it's not like we were paying any more attention to our kids, or engaging more with the environment,* just because we weren't on the phone.** But the phone thing feels creepy to me, somehow, and I can't really pick out exactly why.

Dutch did engage with some science, but I was too grumpy to appreciate it. She was driving me completely up the wall by her reflexive response to EVERY SINGLE exhibit/activity, which was to walk up to it, stare at it for half a second, then turn to me and say "What is this?" to which I would say "I don't know. Maybe you should READ THE DAMN SIGN!"***  Then Dutch would read the sign, do something with the exhibit, walk to the next exhibit, turn to me, and say "What is this?"

Anyway. Maybe I should try to get more sleep. And we DID have fun, when I wasn't busy being grumpy.


* We both, on our tours of Skipper-duty, spent lots of time sitting limply on small chairs, staring off into space. Quality parenting time is very valuable to us...
**We still have our antique cell phone, which has no camera, no internet, and only prepaid minutes on it. We usually forget to turn it on- we mostly use it when the kids are in childcare or when we're traveling - and today, as is often the case on weekends, we left it at home. 
*** I've regained some of my voice, but I still sound like a heavy-smoking ogre, which made this exercise even more painful.

Stuff I Like

1) My boots. Oh, I love them. (In related news, it turns out that tights that aren't fifteen years old and ill-fitting are way, way more comfortable than tights that are.)
2) My new stand mixer. Oh, I love it. You should SEE it mixing stuff! You guys, it CUTS IN BUTTER FOR ME!
3) Skipper's new attitude toward preschool. Apparently being wrenched away from her routine for a week made her realize that her routine isn't all that bad, actually.
4) The internet. We have to hire a babysitter to cover the two days a week when Skipper's not in preschool, because I have a new (temporary, part-time) job,* and the internet is so great for this sort of thing. Remember how people used to put help wanted ads in the newspaper? How did people find babysitters before there was craigslist?
5) My new commitment to being a Tiger Mother for ten minutes a day. I'm pretty excited about this. Dutch is taking an after-school Spanish class two days a week, and she came home from her first class today whining about how she hated the class. She hates it because the teacher doesn't speak any English, and Dutch doesn't understand anything and IT'S SO HARD, MOM. I gave her a stern lecture about how learning is hard, and nothing worth having in this world comes easy** and blah bitty blah bitty blah blah blah. Later, Cook gave her the same lecture*** and then I decided that she would have to practice her Spanish vocabulary ten minutes a day. Tonight she painstakingly made seven flashcards, and memorized their contents. Rrrarr!
6) Our ten-year-old wooden drying rack. The sunshine is finished for the year here in Portland, and wet clothing hung outside will only get wetter.
7) Playdough.
8) Furniture slider pads
9) My bike helmet.


*Yeah, I got a job. It's an internship, actually, and it's a good thing, and I'm looking forward to it, but I'm just not very excited about it, somehow. I would have been quite excited about it two years ago. Now I'm so cynical about the prospect of it actually leading anywhere that I can't dig up much enthusiasm.


** Yes, those words came out of my mouth. I was amazed.


*** Except better. It was a little bit inspiring.

It's Friday NIGHT!

Here's what I've been doing lately, not necessarily in this order:

1) Listening to this song (but not watching the video). What, you don't like the song? You find the subject matter creepy? I don't care.
2) Wishing that our summer weather had happened IN THE SUMMER, instead of waiting until September to do its thing.
3) Having more bike conversion experiences. Today, you guys, I biked ALL THE WAY DOWNTOWN!! I biked across the goddamn bridge. I am SO BRAVE! I actually chanted inspirational things to myself for the last half of the trip - "Look at you! You're crossing the bridge! You're biking DOWNTOWN! You're crossing the bridge!" - while dozens of other bicyclists and joggers (!) whizzed past me.
4) Doing laundry. Bike conversion experiences involve a lot of sweating.
5) Deciding that if traffic speed was cut down to a 20 mph maximum everywhere except for limited-access highways, basically everything would be better. Seriously, everything.
6) Wondering how to make Dutch happier, or nicer, or something. I think she's pretty fried from the effort of going to school, which doesn't help, but in general right now, she's just awful. The other night she freaked out at dinner, and stomped out the front door. Skipper immediately started howling, and shrieked "No, Dutch, don't run away!" but Cook and I looked at each other a little dreamily. Then she came back in and was incredibly nice and helpful and cheerful the rest of the evening. We thought maybe she'd been body-snatched, but she went back to being kind of an asshole the next day, so that theory was busted.
7) Watching TV while washing dishes.
8) Obsessively combing Ebay in search of more shoes with lemurs on them.
9) Trying to teach Skipper that it's GOOD to wash your body occasionally.
10) Working.
11) Thinking of ways to prepare and eat tomatoes.
12) Trying to avoid having to explain September 11th to Dutch.

Today a random guy with lots of missing teeth and a strong odor of alcohol helped me fix my bike on my way home from work. (And he really helped me - I would have taken much, much longer to solve the problem he diagnosed and fixed in about 12 seconds, and he was super-nice about my complete mechanical idiocy.) That was a lovely thing.

A really big whine.

I'm pretty sure I'm doing something wrong. I have so much to do, and I do it so incompletely and so poorly that I feel like a fraud as a grown-up. Seriously. I don't even DO that much, and I feel overwhelmed. Here's what I try to do:

1) Raise children without fucking them up too badly.

2) Feed the family reasonably healthily.

3) Maintain the household (and family) in a not-too-filthy state

4) Do an okay job at work.

5) Stay on top of our patched-together childcare system.

6) Not be a jerk.

7) Stay in touch with a few people outside my immediate family.

8) Maintain the house and yard in a not-too-shabby state.

9) Stay at least sort of connected with my husband.

My to-do list has stuff on it like "water plants" and "take shower" and "wash breakfast dishes" and "take out trash" and "decide whether or not to get a seismic retrofit so your house won't fall off the foundation if the Big Earthquake hits while you still own it" and it takes forever just to do that.* Not to mention the looming to-do item of GET A GODDAMNED JOB ALREADY. Plus I'm supposed to be taking care of myself (exercise! meditation! vacations!) and keeping my marriage zesty (dates! romantic notes! lacy underpants!) and building community (book clubs! neighborhood associations! potluck dinners!) and being politically active (letters to senators! protests! volunteering!) and homesteading (sewing! canning! other frugal wholesome arts!) and all kind of other stuff that would make me happier and better and whatever. I go back and forth between thinking many people feel this way, and then noticing that I know many people who get twice as much done as I do. (You KNOW those people. Some of you are those people. How do you do it, anyway? Is there a drug for this?)

So am I wildly incompetent? Is my laziness even more rampant than I thought? Did I miss some big secret about how to do this?** Is anybody else's adulthood as jury-rigged as mine? Or maybe I just spend too much time blogging.***

Anyway, I can live with it. I know that I could make more time by being more efficient and not wasting time on the internet. I just wish there was a little more real down time. Sometimes Dutch complains when I make her do onerous stuff like pick up her dirty clothes and put them in the laundry basket, rather than leave them on the floor. She says "I have to do ALL THE WORK!!!" and I have to take a deep breath so I don't whack her upside the head with her grimy socks.

*Painting one room of our house took us three weeks to complete. (In our defense, Cook is a perfectionist and insisted on multiple coats, and the previous owner was so sloppy about painting that there was quite a bit of remediation to do.)

**I'm looking for a really good tip here, like "Wait, didn't you get the manual?" or "You were supposed to buy a self-cleaning house!" or "Silly, you don't actually have to worry about retirement because civilization's going to collapse and all you'll need is a seismically-retrofitted basement full of food, attack dogs, and guns!"

***Yesterday I was emailing while Skipper wandered around the study, and after a while I looked over and found she'd gone to sleep on the floor, her butt up in the air and all her limbs neatly folded under her. I think having your kid fall asleep on the floor while you waste time on the internet probably qualifies as inattentive parenting.

Money, verbing, pink things, and tomatoes

In light of our Austerity Budget, and my stay-at-home status three days a week, I've been poking around in the recesses of the part of the internet dedicated to saving money. I have learned a lot. I subscribed to a blog devoted to Frugal Living, which includes posts several times a day about deals you can get at Walgreens or Safeway or whatever. Many of these deals require something called "couponing" which is something I don't really think should be a verb. Couponing apparently requires not only obsessive pursuit of newspaper inserts and store flyers, but also making multiple small transactions (due to restrictions on the coupons). Couponers (is this language weirdness making you as uncomfortable as it makes me?) will go to a store, buy three things, then go back around and get in line again to buy four more things, then go to another store and buy two things, etc. The author has been posting a bit about how she manages the logistics of this, and it involves a LOT of time and driving* and stockpiling of random crap. And a lot of the things you can buy with these deals are kind of ... well... gross. There aren't a lot of coupons for fresh produce, for example, or bulk bulghur or stuff like that. There are a lot of great deals on Shampoo That's Full of Nasty Chemicals or on Snacks That Are Full of White Flour And Chemicals. I think the creepiest thing about it, though, is that it's not about saving money. It's about buying stuff, for cheap. You would save more money by replacing your shampoo with baking soda. It's not about thrift at all - it's about consumption, and the thrill of the consumption hunt.**

So... I'm not going to become a couponer. I have bought some things, though, like maple syrup, off tips from that blog. And I have signed up for Groupon. And Ebates. I am trying not to define myself by what I buy. I think I need a hobby (other than worrying about my tomato plants).

I am reading*** a book called Cinderella Ate My Daughter, which is about the whole girlie-girl/princess/pretty thing and how it's ... um... eating our daughters. It's a sort of a long-form blog, so it's not exactly introducing new research or ideas, but it's a nice mulling-over of some of the stuff that all the parents of girls I know are wrestling with. ****

My tomatoes are still alive! I am following a rigorous schedule of bringing the three mobile ones inside the garage and wrapping the three immobile ones in plastic in the evening, and liberating them all in the morning. Hopefully, my efforts will pay off with actual tomatoes, maybe in early September, but I have doubts. Portland is not prime tomato-growing territory, even when the spring isn't greyer, colder, and wetter than usual.

*Which, given my job and my personal feelings, is a little upsetting. I spend a lot of time myself trying to encourage people to consolidate their trips in order to reduce driving, and the idea of pursuing a behavior that makes you drive MORE just seems crazy to me.

** Also, all the couponing/frugality blogs I've come across have emphasized to a creepy extent the importance of making your husband happy. One thrifty lady specifically mentioned that she buys a specific snack for her husband that he likes, and NOBODY ELSE CAN HAVE ANY. She doesn't buy treats for the rest of the family. He gets privileges he is the man, and he is supporting the family, and it is her job to make him happy. Another one specifically identified that her housekeeping goal is to make her husband happy, because it is his home that she is making.

*** Dear Multnomah County Library, I love you SO MUCH!!! I want to MARRY YOU!!!!!!! OMG, I LOOOOOOOOVE YOU!!!!!!!

**** I signed Dutch up for the following activities over the next four months: T-ball, soccer, swimming, and "Outdoor Living" day camp. This is nice and gender-neutral, but after reading half of this book, I think I need to find a good engineering day camp for her, too.

Especially my dad.

I know some scientists. They're ALL like this: http://xkcd.com/877/

Hacking

Skipper really likes to play with the computer. She has a gift for pushing just the right keys to screw things up.

Also, she says everything belongs to her. I let her and Dutch play in the toy aisle of the grocery store recently, and when it was time to go, she put everything back but refused to give up a little nerf football. She clutched it to her chest and said "Skipper. Take. Me. Take."

And it's ALWAYS her turn. "My. TURN!!!!"

I love this so strangely much.